It shouldn’t come as any great surprise that a country known for obscure hobbies and an impressive railway system has given birth to a new pastime: Capturing video footage from the window of a moving train.

The trains geeks in question are a subset of a subset of railways fanatics, or “tetsudo” fans. Broadly speaking, the enthusiasts can be divided into “noritetsu” (riding trains) or “toritetsu” (capturing images of trains) groups. Within the toritetsu group, the shooting of rail video has exploded in recent years with the increasing popularity of smartphones.

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